Movies.

Don't Fence Him In

Gus Van Sant's Idiosyncratic `Even Cowgirls Get The Blues' Is Ready To Roll

May 15, 1994|By Patrick Z. McGavin. Special to the Tribune.

Resplendent in a brilliant red outfit, filmmaker Gus Van Sant stood in the vast space of Toronto's Elgin Theatre to introduce the North American premiere of his fourth feature, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." A free-form, idiosyncratic work taken from Tom Robbins' 1976 counterculture novel, the movie had a troubled history, having been dropped by one studio and its release delayed.

Ira Deutchman, president of Fine Line Features, the film's distributor, was anxious to see how the film would play with the Toronto Film Festival's English-speaking audience.

He and Van Sant had just returned from the Venice Film Festival, where they had attributed the film's subdued, if respectful, response to cultural and linguistic barriers.

When the Toronto screening began last fall, the audience seemed nervous and hesitant at first, but soon a sense of languor settled in. Most of the seats in the balcony were empty by the time the film was over. The applause, a courtesy extended most film festival screenings, was terse and momentary.

Van Sant is almost imprisoned by his own standards. He vaulted to the front ranks of leading American filmmakers on the basis of three distinct, lyrical works: "Mala Noche" (1986), "Drugstore Cowboy" (1989) and "My Own Private Idaho" (1991).

People walk into his films with the expectation of artistry and craft and, with "Cowgirls," he had to win over not only the partisans of the book but also his own band of followers.

On the eve of the film's scheduled opening in November 1993, Deutchman announced the release was being delayed at Van Sant's request so he could make structural cuts and revisions.

Eight months later, the new version is ready for release. The film was initially set to open April 29 before Fine Line settled on Friday (leading to more negative speculation). As it opens in 600 theaters, the question in many minds is whether the negative media coverage has irrevocably damaged the film's reputation and will discourage the public from seeing the work.

Looking back, Deutchman didn't think the Toronto audience was the right mix for this film.

"They weren't open-minded enough to see that kind of film. But over time, after Toronto, Gus felt there were things with the film he would like to tinker with, which is actually a pretty common thing with filmmakers," Deutchman says.

"We knew Gus was opening himself up to a lot of speculation because the media would jump to conclusions about what this all meant. To people who don't know the filmmaking process (the recutting) seems like an act of desperation, where really it's just pragmatism. We wanted to give him some extra time until he was comfortable with the result. With all of his films, Gus has had a similar need to experiment with the shape and form," he says.

"Films always take time," Van Sant said during an interview in New York last month. "I think whether they take 10 years to get made or whether it's long in postproduction, that isn't relevant to anything except public perception, which is interesting," he says.

Set during the early '70s, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" is unmistakably a Van Sant production. Like all of the director's work, the story examines themes of origins, self-fulfillment and personal discovery. The narrative tracks the forlorn wanderings of Sissy Hankshaw (Uma Thurman), a beautiful woman born with freakishly oversized thumbs that have made her the world's greatest hitchhiker.

Escaping her dreary lower-class Virginia existence, she makes an epic journey from the quixotic urban landscape of New York to the rolling hills of the Pacific Northwest. Sent to the Rubber Rose Ranch health spa in Oregon on a modeling assignment, Sissy falls in with a group of militant cowgirls who revolt against the bourgeois trappings of the place. There, Sissy falls for the ringleader, Bonanza Jellybean (Rain Phoenix, younger sister of the late actor River Phoenix).

The new version is not radically different from the one that was shown in Toronto, with the exception of the ending. The tone and style remain unaltered, and the running time of both versions is virtually identical. Van Sant has streamlined and simplified the plot, helped out by voiceover narration written and spoken by Robbins. The pace is swifter and more compressed. Van Sant has forsaken much of the "straight" material, such as Sissy's marriage and her adventures in New York, to concentrate on the feminist solidarity of the ranch.

"I thought the film played pretty well (in Toronto). The decision to make the changes resulted from feedback from people who worked on the film," Van Sant says. "Once I had the chance to look at the film, I realized we were de-focused from the main story, the relationship between Sissy and Bonanza Jellybean. I think it took too long to get to the ranch and the cowgirls," Van Sant says.